Yes, insisting on double stringing for Dowland seems fairly picky. Anyway when asked to perform at a church concert of local amateurs in Ireland some years ago when I was only beginning with my lute and didn't feel competent with it, I obliged with rattling off a keyboard transcription of the Dowland "Lachrymae" (out of an anthology of keyboard transcriptions of English lute music, ed. by Alan Booth -- if I remember correctly -- with an introduction by Thurston Dart) -- on the instrument provided for the occasion, a shiny new Yamaha studio grand piano with the customary triple stringing of a piano and with the big black lid thrown wide open. I followed this with a keyboard transcription of a Fantasia of Fuenllana, out of the Orphenica Lyra, from the monumental Oxford book of this vihuela stuff, ed. Charles Jacobs. Jacobs is a desperately uptight scholarly academic who nonetheless migrated Fuenllana's defenceless vihuela onto the keys, whether of single, double, or triple stringing -- thereby conferring undoubted blessings on keyboard players and their listeners. The effect of the grand piano was positively shattering I might add, especially in the case of the Fuenllana (Fantasia 34, a very extroverted passionate piece which leaps ahead of its time into big Romantic music and could well be given the total treatment and transcribed for orchestra with double basses and kettle drums). Conversely Fuenllana himself, the vihelist, squeezed oceans of big choral music onto the exclusive little vihuela.The "Lachrymae" got bandied about from one instrumentation to another in its time, there are three glossados on it in the Fitzwilliam by as many compossers -- for single-strung virginals. On the big ugly Yamaha the "Lachrymae" yielded to a lot of modelling which could never happen with a Renaissance instrument, it came across as a kind of contrapuntal Schubert, and although I don't really respond to this as a preference, I see no harm in having some fun. Unfortunately I never got tuned in on the Sting thing and so cannot commit myself to a reaction to it. Admittedly there may be limits. Once when I was a young boy in England in the 1930's I heard Beethoven's Fifth on the wireless and orchestrated entirely for differently pitched automobile klaxons, and I admit I doubt if Ludwig would have been too happy about it. Frank Russell
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